A Worthy but Knotty Question

By Jake Lamar

Should a secretary (female) earn as much as a trucker (male)?

The State of Washington pays Helen Castrilli, a secretary at its largest mental hospital, $1,300 a month. But studies conducted by a consulting firm hired by the state calculated that her work is "worth" the same as the work of those in different jobs making $350 a month more. When Castrilli and eight other workers sued, claiming sex discrimination, a federal-court judge in Tacoma decided in their favor. That ruling is now being appealed by state officials, with the Reagan Administration considering joining in the case against Castrilli and her coworkers. The dispute is the latest battle over the politically charged question of requiring equal pay for jobs of comparable worth. "Not only is this the civil rights issue of the '80s," says Ann Lewis of the Democratic National Committee, "but it may well be the gender-gap issue of 1984."

Federal law clearly prescribes that workers in the same job cannot be paid differently because of their race or sex, a concept known as equal pay for equal work. The issue of equal pay for comparable work, however, is vastly more complex. It arises because studies show that jobs traditionally held by women (nurse, librarian, secretary) tend to pay less than jobs generally held by men (accountant, construction worker, trucker) that seem to demand the same level of skills, responsibility and effort. This is a major reason why working women, despite equal-pay laws, still earn only about 60-c- for every dollar earned by men. The question now is whether courts and the Government have the right, or the practical ability, to calculate the relative worth of disparate jobs and then to mandate that wages be adjusted to reflect these determinations.

The ruling in Washington, which could cost the state more than $400 million over the next 18 months if it stands, was based on the premise that the comparable worth of different jobs can be quantified. In carrying out the state's studies, the consulting firm of Norman D. Willis & Associates used a system that attributed "worth points" for such factors as knowledge and skills, mental demands, accountability and working conditions. Wages for jobs held mainly by women paid 20% less than male-dominated jobs with the same worth points (see chart). In 1976, the year that an expanded Willis study came out, Governor Daniel Evans allocated $7 million in his budget to rectify these perceived disparities, but his successor, Dixy Lee Ray, the state's first female Governor, killed the plan when she took office in 1977. In the Castrilli case, Judge Jack Tanner ruled last November that the disparities violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which, he said, "was designed to bar not only overt employment discrimination but also practices that are fair in form but discriminatory in operation."

Proponents of comparable worth contend that setting equitable wage scales for different jobs is not all that difficult. Says Eleanor Holmes Norton, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center: "This is done every day by American business and industry." Besides, say advocates, simply because male-dominated jobs tend to draw higher pay than female-dominated ones on the open market does not mean that government salaries should reflect these vestiges of sexual stereotypes and discrimination. Nor would remedying the situation force some workers to take lower wages. "You have to equalize up," says Jeanne Atkins, a staff attorney for the Women's Equity Action League. "That is fairly well settled in employment-discrimination law."

At least 18 states have accepted all or some of these arguments, and are studying comparable-worth pay scales. Municipal workers in San Jose, Calif., went on strike for nine days in 1981 and forced the city to provide $1.5 million for pay-equity adjustments based on sex discrimination. The Minnesota legislature last year appropriated $21.7 million for a similar restructuring of wages.

William Bradford Reynolds, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for civil rights, is among those who dispute the logic behind Judge Tanner's ruling. He and other opponents argue that it would be impractical to impose wage scales that differ from those set by the open market, which reflect the supply and demand for different types of workers. Says Robert Williams, an attorney who represents management in labor negotiations: "Unless we are prepared to alter radically our whole economic system, a solution that holds individual employers responsible for market conditions, or forces them to ignore the market in favor of purely internal value scales, simply cannot work." It would also be prohibitively expensive. According to Dan Glasner of the Philadelphia consulting firm Hay Associates, which has been producing job-evaluation systems for more than 40 years, raising the wage scales of jobs traditionally held by women to eliminate disparities in the earnings of men and women would cost some $320 billion in added annual wages and increase inflation by 10%.

Opponents also contend that it is impossible to develop formulas that accurately assess the difference in worth of jobs as diverse as, say, truck driver and secretary. How are such factors as prestige, creativity or excitement to be weighed? A 1981 study by the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that women's jobs tend to pay less than men's, but stated, "We do not believe the value--or worth--of jobs can be determined by scientific methods. Hierarchies of job worth are always, at least in part, a reflection of values."

Washington State case is likely to wend its way to the Supreme Court. In a 1981 case involving prison matrons and guards, the high court ruled that women could sue over pay discrimination when men and women held jobs that were similar. But it declined at that time to decide on the validity of cases involving the comparable worth of dissimilar jobs. Meanwhile the issue will continue to be debated in labor negotiations, state legislatures and, perhaps above all, the political arena.

--By Jake Lamar. Reported by Anne Constable/ Washington and Julie Johnson/Seattle

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington, Julie Johnson/Seattle